Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [7]
Hoshi snickered. “Don’t you think you might be exaggerating just a tiny bit?”
“Maybe. But not by much. Come on, Hoshi, you can’t tell me you that you and Corporal Guitierrez have exactly become sorority sisters.”
Mayweather saw Hoshi’s expression darken slightly; the recent cramped living conditions aboard Enterprise had to be taxing the patience of even the most pleasantly disposed crew members. “Not exactly,” she said at length. “But I’m not quite ready to do her bodily harm yet either.”
“Then maybe you’re just more patient than I am,” he said, wondering if anyone who could make a career out of parsing unknown languages might possess patience of an entirely different order than his own. “Give it time.”
She shrugged, as though conceding his point, but only somewhat. “You must have learned a thing or two about patience during those long freight runs aboard the Horizon, lumbering along at warp three from Draylax to Vega.”
“Try warp one point eight,” he said, grinning.
“You’re making my point for me, Travis. You’re a space boomer. You learned more patience working on that freighter than most people develop over a whole lifetime.”
“But I also lost my patience for that sort of life, remember? Which is a big part of the reason I ended up here.”
She sighed. “Still, things can’t possibly be that bad between you and Corporal Chang.”
He shook his head. “Oh, you bet they can. I swear, one or the other of us is going to leave feet-first in shirtsleeves through one of the airlocks.”
“This isn’t like you, Travis. What’s he done that’s so awful you’d fantasize about making him walk the plank?”
Mayweather opened his mouth, then closed it again. He realized all at once that there wasn’t any single incident he could point to. Rather, his irritation stemmed from a seemingly endless series of tiny slights and indignities; it came from the relentless accumulation of Chang’s presumptuousness and arrogance.
“For one thing, he’s a neat freak,” he said at length.
There was pity evident in Hoshi’s eyes, but she also looked perplexed. “A ‘neat freak.’ ”
He nodded. “It must be pathological. My quarters are so spotless they make Doctor Phlox’s sickbay look like a Tandaran labor camp. You could eat off the deck plates!”
Impatience began to displace Hoshi’s expression of baffled sympathy. “And that’s a bad thing?”
“It is when you can’t find your own stuff half the time because of it. The copy of Chicago Mobs of the Twenties my brother gave me went missing for two days until I found out Chang had stuck it in the bottom of one of the footlockers. I asked him if he suffers from clutterphobia, or some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He said it was just standard MACO discipline and suggested that I try a little of it sometime.”
As though anybody could grow up on a freighter as busy as the Horizon and not learn a thing or two about discipline along the way, he thought.
Hoshi suppressed a laugh, which came out as an abbreviated snort. “I don’t think the compulsive neatness is necessarily a MACO thing. Selma Guitierrez is a complete slob. Having to clean up after her probably bugs me almost as much as Chang’s habits bother you.”
Mayweather grinned. “Maybe we ought to consider swapping roommates.”
“Very funny. But maybe you’ve put your finger on a partial solution to your own problem. Why don’t you ask D.O. to give you a different room assignment?”
“And admit defeat in front of Lieutenant O’Neill?” Enterprise’s third-watch commander, Donna “D.O.” O’Neill, had earned her reputation as a no-nonsense officer; the last thing Mayweather wanted was for either O’Neill or Sub-Commander T’Pol, both of whom were working hard to oversee the present difficult crew living arrangements, to start thinking of him as a whiner.
“Okay,